Means for accurately tracking, displaying, and managing a large number of objects within a known area with high precision, with respect to both location and time, presently do not exist. A system providing such means would be highly beneficial in retail, warehousing, facility management, office document control, and other environments.
For instance, the retail sales industry has embraced many advances in technology enabling users to automatically assess inventory on hand, items placed on sales floors, and items sold. These advances have come primarily through bar code technology and point-of-sale computerization. It is also generally known to locate objects using triangulation methods. For instance in MacDoran, U.S. Pat. No. 4,215,345, a time difference of arrival (TDOA) technique to determine location is disclosed, involving the computation of the intersection of two or more hyperbolic surfaces.
However, there are currently no means to track the location of items for sale in a retail environment and to simultaneously display those positions in a modelled real-time retail environment. In addition, there currently exists no means of quantifying and analyzing the effects on sales of store layout, particularly the impact of rearranging fixtures to place items for sale at various different locations. Therefore, while it is generally known that the location of merchandise items and the layout of store fixtures impacts the buying habits of consumers, no data exists which tracks these characteristics, nor are there tools to use such data to assign value to location for optimizing space.